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Tag Archives: Automator

I found myself not so satisfied with Wunderlist, as it started to cause some troubles with high CPU load on my Mac. At this time, Apple started shipping OS X Mountain Lion and included the great Reminders.app with it! So I gave it a try… and stayed loyal to the Reminders.app until today (thanks to it’s iCloud sync).

Automator itself is a really powerful tool for automating recurring tasks in OS X. Unfortunately it’s still not really something regular Mac users are using for making tasks and working in OS X more efficient. If you add the powerful AppleScript into Automator you can even get much more out of it, but of course this requires some basic programming knowledge.

I always hate spending time on manual tasks, which I think should somehow be automated. Why not let computers do work more for you?

One of my most recent ideas is an Automator application combined with some basic AppleScripting in order to open a particular website. But not just like a static shortcut, but adding some flexibility. The following example will show you, how to directly open the Wikipedia page containing the List of Episodes of a given TV show. Think outside the box in order to adapt this for many other uses.

I started using the fantastic app “Wunderlist” for my personal Task Management on the Mac, of course with synchronisation to iPhone and the web.

Before I used to write all my To-dos simply into the Stickies.app – which worked, but was not too flexible. While migrating all pending Tasks from my notes, I realized that I’d love to be able to use the right-click-contextmenu to send the current text selection to Wunderlist. As I have done similiar things already for image manipulations, etc. using an Automator Service, I knew where to start for my new requirement

It’s a common problem between Mac and Windows users, when you create a ZIP archive under Mac OS X, that it will contain a bunch of unwanted files, which you don’t want to have included in the archive. In OS X’s Finder you won’t notice that, because the Finder is hiding them from you. But they will show up on the Windows side after unzipping the archive.

Fortunately there is quite a simple and straight-forward solution for Mac OS X to create so called “Clean Archives”, using a predesigned Automator action.

Who I am

Graduated in Business IT & Economics. Project Manager. St. Galler. Mac User.
I like cooking, reading, hiking, biking, having a drink with friends, watching movies, web stuff.
On Twitter as @oliverattweetin